Comic-Con 2014

Kenneth Hough (University of California, Santa Barbara) examines comic book speculations on drone warfare in the 1940s and 1950s, comparing these early images with modern debates about the use of unmanned weapons. Melissa Colleen Stevenson (Stanford University) compares Fables' Fabletown Compact with the Truth and Reconciliation commissions instituted in South Africa after apartheid and the Ley de Punto Final passed in Argentina after the fall of dictatorship there, examining how Bill Willingham's work approaches real world philosophical questions about the nature of forgiveness, the demands of justice, and the very human desire for vengeance. Hadas Marcus (Tel Aviv University) reviews how various environmental themes are depicted in comics, from classic examples that only touch upon somewhat vague ecological topics, to contemporary works that explore looming environmental and sustainability issues in a much more detailed and often darkly apocalyptic manner.

Robert C. Harvey (Meanwhile: A Biography of Milton Caniff, Creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon) reviews the career of Bill Hume: sculptor, artist, actor, playwright, magician, ventriloquist, author, clown, newspaper man, photographer, animator, television and film producer, corporate art director and cartoonist, and artist of pretty girl cartoons featuring the friendly relations between American G.I.'s and the female population of Japan. Melissa Loucks (University of Florida) reminds us of the work comic strips do toward thwarting the distortions and suppressions of the dominant civil rights narrative, looking at the work of Oliver Harrington, George Herriman, and Jackie Ormes. And Dwain C. Pruitt (University of Louisville) considers the roles that Matt Baker's race and sexual orientation may have played in his work and in his most celebrated contribution, the "Baker Girl," asserting that Baker's work was shaped by the unique African-American expressive and visual culture of 1930s-1950s Harlem.

Recently, Afrofuturism has been making a global resurgence. Creators in all media forms have been producing speculative narratives that challenge the status quo, remix historical perceptions, and situate the black body as subject. John Jennings (University at Buffalo, SUNY), Stanford Carpenter (Institute for Comics Studies), Regina Bradley (Kennesaw State University), and Jeremy Love (Bayou) ask if the term Afrofuturism still remains the proper designation for invoking ideas of race and cultural production, examining the new notion of the "EthnoSurreal" and how it is comprised of the EthnoGothic and EthnoFuturism. This panel will also tackle the articulation of how these designations are defined and how they can possibly challenge and reimagine ideas around socially constructed ideas regarding racial identity, its visualization, and its consumption through the comics medium.

Comic-Con offers students of popular culture an amazing venue to study how culture is marketed to and practiced by its fans. Rahni Argo-Bryant (University of Alabama), Johnathan Butler (Florida State University), Kelsey Cute (Lynchburg College), Katherine Deck (Wittenberg University), Judith Gallegos (Lynchburg College), Madeline Geiger (Wittenberg University), Christopher McDaniel (Wittenberg University), Alora Slak (Otterbein University), Desiree Smith (Lynchburg College), and Amy Williams (State University of New York at Albany) present initial findings from a week-long ethnographic field study of the intersection of fan practice at the nexus of cultural marketing and fan culture that is Comic-Con 2014. Matthew J. Smith (Wittenberg University) moderates.